Even if I weren't a luddite in general, 9/11 and the 2003 blackout alone would have convinced me of the usefulness of having a corded landline.

I think if you live in the land of snow and ice, land lines are less reliable, as ice storms or heavy snow have certainly knocked mine out. I have never lost cell use, except for no being able to recharge, but since I work in a hospital which is powered by itself (we use the excess steam from our steam heat to make electricity or something-- we actually sell some to the power company) I can always go recharge

If you have a dial tone, you can dial 911 from a corded phone with or without phone service to that line.

Laga, I succomed to info mercial and ordered the MagicJack. It's $20/year voip. I'm getting it so I can have a local phone number for the main gate to call and be buzzed in. It's not quite a land line. But not a cell. Just need hi speed Internet.

Yes, that's the bundling that would save us $100 a month, if we went with voip. If we switch cable and internet to Verizon we save $60 a month. Right now we have Verizon for the phone and Time Warner for the cable and internet. And we don't even have nickleodeon, I found out when I tried to tune in to the new Wolverine:X-Men.

We have Time Warner bundled for cable and internet and then use Vonage for telephone and have been fine, but we do have a cell phone as backup. Vonage had the advantage of being both cheaper than Time Warner telephone service and not partitioning off bandwidth. It gives us a "land line" for faxing and minutes since we have a cheap low minute cell phone plan.

Anyone good at writing DOS scripts? I want a .bat file that I can execute with a right-click (using the "send to" menu) that will create a copy of the selected file, with the year, month and date appended to the end of the file name, like so:

filetobebackedup.extyymmdd

...with yymmdd being the current date.

No thoughts on ink cartridge purveyors?

I've been using these [link] for about six months with no trouble.

Okay, I am having Internet connectivity issues at home, and I am going to cry. I am at work now and hoping the situation resolves itself magically, but if it does not, I need help.

Last night, I shut down my computer. This morning, I turned it on. The only weird variable is that I had just installed an AVG update that required me to restart; I had not restarted until the shutdown.

All my modem lights were on. Outlook Express downloaded my mail. Yahoo! Messenger connected.

NOTHING ELSE WORKED.

AIM wouldn't connect. AVG Update wouldn't connect. Windows Update wouldn't download. Firefox and IE could not load webpages; they were continually "waiting."

I called Comcast, and they reset my modem. Last week, I had a similar issue, and resetting the modem fixed it. This time, it did not help. The tech guy had me restart my computer after he reset the modem, and that didn't help. I reset my IP address (release, renew), and I was able to ping with no problem (and for some reason, AIM connected, but after I released and renewed again, it didn't). But nothing else would connect. No browers, no AVG, no Windows Update, no Semagic. Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, never loading.

Curiously, Remote Desktop worked fine.

The Comcast guy was at a loss. From his end, he saw that I had a strong signal, so he didn't know why only a few programs were connecting. It seemed to me like only certain ports were open or something.

My Local Area Network settings look fine, too. It says I'm sending and receiving with no problem. Yet, my programs aren't using the connection for some fucking reason.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Anyone have any idea what's going on and why this randomly happened and how I can fix it? Please?